Browsing Collection

Since January I've adopted what for me is a new approach to finding new books by authors I don't already know. I browse the New Books section.

In the process I have marveled at the arcane masterly of book cover designers.Somehow my eye is consistently drawn to the sort of books I want to read.

Here is a list of books which "leapt off the shelves at me" over the past five months.

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The supernatural enhancements : a novel, by Edgar Cantero

This was a surprising hybrid. It initially presents itself as a ghost story, yet it develops into a sort of steam punk/science fiction mystery.

As Booklist writes, the story is told "through diary entries, transcripts of audio and video recordings, letters, and other media," which means Cantero must lead the reader to piece the twisty plot together through glimpses from different sources.This novel might intrigue Arthur Conan Doyle, were he transported into the 21st century.

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Gutenberg's apprentice : a novel, by Alix Christie

I love a well-researched, engagingly written historical novel, especially one which goes behind the sanitized mythology of famous figures to share what the historical record reveals about their real, contradictory complexities.

The author's website writes: "Peter Schoeffer is on the verge of professional success as a scribe in Paris when his foster father, wealthy merchant and bookseller Johann Fust, summons him home to corrupt, feud-plagued Mainz to meet...Johann Gutenberg, a driven and caustic inventor, [who] has devised a revolutionary—and to some, blasphemous—method of bookmaking: a machine he calls a printing press."

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Delia's Shadow, by Jaime Lee Moyer

Light, entertaining mix of "cozy murder mystery" and ghost story.  Follows the formula of the first genre, but with interesting twists.

From the author's website: “Spirits seek vengeance while the young try to build a future in a fog-shrouded San Francisco shaken by more than the great earthquake. This bravura mix of ghost story and historical mystery will chill and grip its readers from first page to last.”—Chaz Brenchley , author of House of Doors and House of Bells

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The three-body problem, by Liu Cixin

A highly thoughtful and unusual approach to science fiction storytelling as a platform for critiquing modern Chinese history and human nature in genera.

"[Spans] multiple decades and characters, but…zooms in on Ye Wenjie and Wang Miao, two scientists in the very near future. Wenjie is an astrophysicist...daughter of a physicist who was executed during the Cultural Revolution for daring to teach the "reactionary" idea of general relativity. Miao is a nanotech engineer, and he's been swept up in a virtual-reality, online video game called Three Body that's so deeply metaphysical, it's begun to resemble a cult….  

"By the time the book hits its peak, it's unveiled a conspiracy that spans solar systems — one that not only threatens to alter the human race, but the very building blocks of physics that we've evolved to understand."—Jason Heller, NPR Books

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The Bend of the World, Jacob Bacharach

Who knew Pittsburgh was so weird? UFOs, a secret society with the world domination ambitions of the Illuminati, and a slacker 20-something antihero who somehow grows up despite himself.Funny, self-deprecating humor with a surprising depth of maturity for a first novel.

"Set in Pittsburgh, the book is a rollicking, occasionally mad blend of dark workplace comedy and crooked love triangle(s), improbably suspended in a web of conspiracies and conspiracy theories involving, variously, UFO sightings over Mount Washington, time travel, a corporate takeover, Bigfoot, secret chambers beneath the Point, Nazi ancestors and plenty of drugs. The narrator is Peter Morrison, age 29, with a fateful 30^th birthday party looming."—by Bill Driscoll, Pittsburgh City Paper.com

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Us conductors : in which I seek the heart of Clara Rockmore, my one true love, finest theremin player the world will ever know, by Sean Michaels

I had known of Lev Sergeyevich Termen as the early 20th century inventor of the theremin, an ethereal musical instrument played without touch, changing pitch and volume by moving one's hands within an electromagnetic field.

There is so much more to Termen's story in this fictionalized autobiography. Lenin sends Lev to the United States as an industrial spy, something he does with clumsy desperation.  The story is supposedly written later by Lev while in captivity under Beria, Stalin's chief of secret police.

"[Lev] delights in creating new inventions and discussing theory with foreign scientists, but leaves the subterfuge up to his handler. Leon’s chief joy, other than science, is an American violinist named Clara Reisenberg. Their love affair is intense, buoyed by Harlem dance halls and the ethereal song of the theremin."—from The Masters Review: A Platform for Emerging Writers

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The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
(author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go)

A fable of a misty, empty post-Arthurian 6th century England in which everyone suffers a supernatural memory loss. An elderly Briton peasant couple set out to find a grown son they vaguely remember having left them as a youth under troubling circumstances. On the way they meet Saxon villagers and warriors, fiercely ascetic monks, Aurthur's sole surviving knight, and the curses and mysteries of this superstitious world.

Ishiguro lets his readers struggle together with his characters as they reconstruct the past and seek to escape the dooms it may hide.

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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

A funny, emotionally honest, semi-autobiographical YA tale of a teenage Spokane Indian's effort to escape the alcoholism and poverty of "the rez" by transferring to the whites-only high school 22 miles away.

"For 15 years now, Sherman Alexie has explored the struggle to survive between the grinding plates of the Indian and white worlds. He’s done it through various characters and genres, but The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian may be his best work yet. Working in the voice of a 14-year-old forces Alexie to strip everything down to action and emotion, so that reading becomes more like listening to your smart, funny best friend recount his day while waiting after school for a ride home.—Bruce Barcott, The New York Times: Sunday Book Review

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Heraclix and Pomp : A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fe, by Forrest Aguirre

Another supernatural tale, this time from 18th century Europe. A necromancer who has brought a golem to life attempts to sacrifice an immortal fairy in a ritual pact with Beelzebub. The two escape and wander from Vienna to Prague to Istanbul to Hell.

Heraclix seeks to rediscover the people from whose body parts he has been reanimated. Pomp seeks to understand the mortality she has now tasted.

I am only a few chapters into this novel, yet it has my full attention.

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What, ME doing readers advisory?!

I recently had an unexpected "readers advisory moment" I want to tell you about. Let me set the stage first.

From 2005 until her death in January 2011, my mother declined rapidly into Alzheimer's Syndrome. For her last three years, Mom was here in Jacksonville, first in assisted living and then skilled nursing care. (See Walhydra's Porch for more of the story.)

This past Christmas, my step-mother gave me a book—at just the right time for me to revisit those memories with seasoned, gentle grief and humor.

When I first saw the cover I was skeptical. "Oh, no," I thought. "Another of those cutesy, sentimental, inspirational animal books."

Ever noticed how book covers of this genre tend to have a common graphic style, just as romance novels do. (BTW, check out Smart Bitches, Trashy Books for some wickedly brilliant reviews of that genre.)

'

In any case, I  changed my expectations at once when I started to read.

On the surface the book is about Oscar, a cat at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center who roams the rooms of this end-stage dementia facility, keeping residents and their families company, and—here's the mystery—curling up on the bed of any resident who is going to die that day and accompanying them in their last hours.

A curiosity, of course. Yet author David Dosa, Steere House's geriatric specialist, actually uses his "investigation" of Oscar as a story-telling vehicle for a gentle but through introduction to the whole realm of medical and emotional issues which challenge dementia patients and their family and professional caretakers.

Dosa writes with a compassionate yet matter-of-fact, unsentimental voice.  Narrating the process of interviewing survivors of residents whom Oscar had comforted, he discloses how he matured in his own efforts to humanize geriatric care for dementia patients.

Near the end, Dosa quotes a medical lecturer who warns her students:

It's about function.... In medicine, doctors often make the mistake of pursuing diagnoses.... Patients like to know what's causing their discomfort or their disability.... In the end, though, it's more about the discomfort or the disability than the name or label....

People care mostly about whether a disease will change the way they live. Will I die from my disease? Will I be able to walk or care for myself? Will I be able to care for my husband, wife, or children? Will it hurt? This is what patients care about most. (144-45)

Here's the passage which resonated most for me and my spouse Jim, since it came so close to our own experience of caring for Mom. Dosa visits Annette and Rita, sisters who shepherded first their father and then their mother through dementia over the course of ten years. They tell him about the last year of their mother's life.

"Sometimes we'd be sitting in her room and she would ask about my father [after he died]." Rita smiled wryly. "We would tell her that our father was answering the telephone and would be back when he was done."

"Eventually you just become good at misdirection," Annette said. "I know I did."

"The little things you do," Rita said with a small laugh. They didn't sound so little to me.

"Did you ever feel guilty about—?"

"About lying?" Rita jumped in.

Annette shook her head emphatically. "We considered it playacting. You have to learn to play a role and distract the person with memory impairment." She smiled, then added, "We could never bring our mother back to our reality. We had to go to hers."

This rings so true.



 So...a long, long set-up for the story I said I was going to tell.

I'm sitting in "Tenbucks" one morning before work, reading Dosa's book. A woman about my age approaches me while she's waiting for her drink and asks me if it's a good book.

"I've seen reviews," she says, " but I wasn't too sure about it."

I tell her a bit of what I've told you, that it's not just a " cutesy, sentimental book" but, rather, a plain-spoken, compassionate story of dementia. I tell her about my stepmother giving me the book in honor of my mother's Alzheimer's death.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I think my husband is in the early stages, and I wondered if I should read this."

I assured her that the book was worth reading, that it covered both the hurts and joys of the experience in a helpful way.

"Thanks you," she said.

So...now I'm doing readers advisory "on the street."

And so it is.

Blessèd Be,
Michael

Harry Potter and the Five Sisters

I haven't yet read The Cuckoo's Calling, so I can't comment on it—though I certainly won't get my knickers in a twist over "Galbraith-Gate."  I'm just glad J.K. is seeking new authorial voices.  She's a brilliant writer.

For my summer reading this year, I felt knackered enough from the challenges of work that I didn't want to "work at" reading. So....I decided to reread the whole Harry Potter series straight through. What a treat!

I'll leave it to the reader to imagine the fascination of being able to catch the set-ups and clues Rowling puts in early volumes for things that happen several volumes later, as well as the mastery with which she weaves her core themes through the seven books. All I'll say for now is that my admiration for her genius in this series keeps increasing.

Yet something struck me toward the end of the last book, The Deathly Hallows, a curiosity about five powerful women.  They are rarely seen in the novels, yet they play essential roles in the overall story.  I thought it might be intriguing for Rowling to write a novel for adults from the perspective of these "Five Sisters."

[spoiler alert]

Three of the sisters belong to the Wizarding Black family, Bellatrix Lestrange, Andromeda Tonks and Narcissa Malfoy. Petunia Dursley and her younger sister, Lily Potter, belong to the Muggle Evans family.

We readers and movie fans of Harry Potter tend to give our attention to two of the sisters. We feel fairly sure we know these women.

Lily, Harry's mother, was murdered by Voldemort,  yet she returns in spirit at key moments of Harry's ordeals.

Bellatrix, cousin of Sirius Black and closest disciple of Voldemort, rages through the later books and dominates the screen.

We see a bit of Petunia in the early chapters of each volume, mostly as a comic character. Some of us, though, recognize her more tragic nature. It is that deeper reality of the character which intrigues me.

The same goes for Narcissa, who rarely appears yet makes a critical choice in the last volume.

Andromeda is scarcely mentioned, except as the "blood traitor" disinherited from the Black family for marrying a Muggle. Nonetheless, her choice allows her daughter Nymphadora (aka "Tonks") to play a powerful role in the series.

Petunia and Narcissa are dominated by men who impose upon them conformity to the worst, most dangerously prideful aspects of their respective Muggle and Death Eater worlds.  For the most part, both them cleave to the expectations of those worlds and strive, sometimes at great expense to themselves, to demand the same of others.

And yet....

At the start of The Order of the Phoenix, Harry rescues his Muggle cousin Dudley from a magical attack. He tries to explain to his furious Uncle Vernon that Voldemort is back.

"Back?" whispered Aunt Petunia. 

She was looking at Harry as she had never looked at him before. And all of a sudden, for the very first time in his life, Harry fully appreciated that Aunt Petunia was his mother's sister. He could not have said why this hit him so very powerfully at this moment. All he knew was that he was not the only person in the room who had an inkling of what Lord Voldemort being back might mean....

The furious pretense that Aunt Petunia had maintained all Harry's life—that there was no magic and no world other than the world she inhabited with Uncle Vernon—seemed to have fallen away. (37-38)

When Uncle Vernon tries to throw Harry out of the magical safe haven of the Dursley home, it is Petunia who—granted, with the encouragement of a howler from Professor Dumbledore, but also out of mother love for Dudley—deflates him with her old what-would-the-neighbors-think pretense.

"He stays," she said.... She was regaining her usual brisk, snappish manner rapidly, though she was still very pale.... "We'll have to keep him." (41)

And, at the end of The Deathly Hallows, it is Narcissa Malfoy who—out of love for her own son Draco, not for Harry—risks all in response to Voldemort's command to make sure Harry is dead.

Hands, softer than he had been expecting, touched Harry's face, pulled back an eyelid, crept beneath his shirt, down to his chest, and felt his heart. He could hear the woman's fast breathing, her long hair tickled his face. He knew that she could feel the steady pounding of life against his ribs.

"Is Draco alive? Is he in the castle?"

The whisper was barely audible; her lips were an inch from his ear, her head bent so low that her long hair shielded his face from the onlookers.

"Yes," he breathed back.

He felt the hand on his chest contract; her nails pierced him. Then it was withdrawn. She had sat up.

"He is dead!" Narcissa Malfoy called to the watchers. (726)

In the darkest of times, five women risk everything for love. Bellatrix for her love of Voldemort's wicked power. Andromeda for the love of the Muggle Ted Tonks. And Lily, Petunia and Narcissa for the love of their sons.

What, I wonder, could we learn of the tragic and powerful family dynamics of the Blacks and the Evans? All five women pulled in extremely different directions. All five together determining the fate of the world.

Now that would be a novel!

New "Reviews" page

Note: I've recently resumed reviewing books for Public Libraries magazine, after a hiatus of several years. In order to toot my own horn, I've added a new "Reviews" page to this blog. What follows is the introductory text.

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I've always believed in continuing education.

Even the best degree program for any career only points your attention in the right direction. Any step along the way may turn corners no curriculum could anticipate. Why stop with what you already know?

Besides, I've always joked that my real profession is being a student. My morale and my performance decline when I'm not learning new stuff.

Hence, once I graduated from the University of South Carolina's School of Library and Information Science (August, 2000) and joined Jacksonville (FL) Public Library, I jumped at the chance to review books for Public Libraries Magazine.

If nothing else, I thought, I could fill in the gaps in my MLIS preparation—I was horrified during my last term when I suddenly realized (Duh!) that I could only take twelve courses and had to skip all those electives I'd been looking forward to.

Plus, I would get all these free books!

The result has been a long series of reviews, published over the years in the "By the Book" column of that magazine. Some of these reviews I'm content with, others, perhaps not, yet the books—with one or two exceptions—were well worth reading.

Librarianship is a lifestyle, a way of looking at and interacting with the world. Our tools are our brains, our imaginations and our love of learning. Books and buildings and the Web are just the infrastructure for what we do with the people we meet.

Keep reading.

Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer

The Centered Librarian has an interesting post about Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer. The book includes a new collection of Edward Gorey's work—on postal envelopes and letters, of all things.

As blogger David Booker write:

Between September 1968 and October 1969, Gorey set out to collaborate on three children’s books with author and editor Peter F. Neumeyer and, over the course of this 13-month period, the two exchanged a series of letters on topics that soon expanded well beyond the three books and into everything from metaphysics to pancake recipes.

Here's an example of the envelope art:

Take a look at this fascinating book.

What They Always Tell Usby Martin Wilson

It is so fine when a book's cover grabs you like this one's does. I haven't even read it yet, but I want to.

And, as I look into the blurbs and reviews, I can see how the image telegraphs the heart of the story.

Here's a blurb from Martin Wilson's blog:

Thoughtful and moving, What They Always Tell Us is a powerful debut novel about the bond between two brothers—and the year that changes everything.

JAMES: Popular, smart, and athletic, James seems to have it all. But the only thing James really wants is his college acceptance letter, so he can get far away from Alabama. In a town where secrets are hard to keep, everyone knows what Alex did at the annual back-to-school party. The only question is why.

ALEX: With his friends no longer talking to him and his brother constantly in motion, Alex is prepared to get through junior year on his own. And he would, if his ten-year-old neighbor, Henry, didn't keep showing up, looking for company. What Alex cares most about is running, and when he's encouraged to try out for cross-country, he's surprised to find more than just a supportive teammate in his brother's friend Nathen.

Lot's of good reviews, too (here and here, for example).

Great work!

Library Blogging by Karen Coombs and Jason Griffey

There's a new book, Library Blogging by Karen Coombs and Jason Griffey, which is highly recommended by Michael Stephens in Tame the Web.

I haven't looked at it myself, yet, but I value TTW's opinions. Here's a little of what Stephens writes:

If you are starting a blogging project in your library or teaching blogging, I’d recommend this one for sure as an up to date choice. I’ll be using it as a classroom resource in my teaching.

For more, visit Library Blogging and add the feed to keep up with additions to the examples used in the book.

Mike

Podcasts

Not at all sure about this one. Not meaning I'm not sure it's well-designed or valuable, generally. Just meaning I probably will not use it much.

That's only because I'm no longer someone who listens to audio media much...except for All Things Considered on the way home from work, and Car Talk during Saturday morning chores.

I decided to try Podcast Alley, partly because I didn't want to wait 20+ minutes for the iTunes download.

I liked the search feature...except that it wasn't very good with exact phrase searching...and I also liked the clean look of the website.

My search was "science fiction reviews," since that's my favorite fiction genre. Got lots of false hits, and lots that weren't very well annotated.

After looking annotations and show lists for several, I picked Science Fiction Book Review Podcast, since it gives reviews of specific titles.

Subscribing in Bloglines was a bit awkward, because the URL Podcast Alley gave me, http://www.sfbrp.com/?feed=podcast, wouldn't work. Knowing how Bloglines usually works, I shortened it to http://www.sfbrp.com/, and that did it.

Here's the link to a podcast review of Greg Bear's Moving Mars, a book I really enjoyed.

We shall see.

Part of my disinterest in personal use of podcasts is the same as my disinterest in downloadable music, video, etc., generally. I just don't use audio/visual media much any more.

In my 20s and 30s I bought LPs every week. When CDs came along, I was losing interest in popular music and not listening to radio as much.

Since the late 1980s, my partner Jim and I haven't had a TV!!!

So....

Nothing against this stuff. It's just not where my interests are.

Mike

Playing around with PBWiki

I've been editing websites since lib'ary school, and I've been using blogging sites since 2006, so I enjoy experimenting with how to configure and post online.

Hence, I liked this sandbox, especially since I've already used "Peanut Butter" Wiki a bit for other purposes.

I added a Favorite Book, a Favorite Vacation Spot, and a new page with a book review which was just published in the July/August 2008 issue of Public Libraries magazine.